"I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair," sings Sandi Thom on one of the summer's big hits. As she probably well knows, notes Frank McNally, this is an impossible ideal.
If punk rockers were noted for anything, it was a shortage of hair. In the unlikely event of them wearing flowers on their heads, they would have had to staple them on. But I take the 24-year-old singer's general point, which is that she would like to have lived in a more committed era than the present one, whether as a hippy or a punk.
As she puts it, poignantly: "In '77 and '69, revolution was in the air/I was born too late to a world that doesn't care." Apathy is certainly rife these days, and not just among twentysomethings. If old fogies were doing their job properly and complaining about how awful young people are, the likes of Sandi Thom would not have to go around composing songs of searing self-criticism. She could just relax and enjoy herself, like you're meant to at 24. But leaving that aside, I wonder if she isn't overstating the case in her eulogy for an innocent time when, as she sings, "computers were still scary and we didn't know everything".
On the first point, computers are arguably scarier now than they were when humans could still beat them at chess. On the second, I distinctly remember a time - probably the late 1970s - when we did know everything. Then more information became available, and afterwards nothing was ever clear again.
I'll give a small example: the hem-line theory of economics. Remember that? It stated that in times of economic confidence, hem-lines went up and in times of depression, they went down. This rule had held true in the 1920s and 1960s, when the shortness of skirts peaked with stock prices. Equally, hem-lines had plunged with the markets in the 1930s, while the 1973 oil crisis led directly to the appalling "maxi" (the full-length skirt, not the RTÉ presenter).
But where is the hem-line theory now? Yes, it only related to skirts, and with ever-more women wearing trousers, the trends were bound to be less reliable. Even so, the notion that the clothes industry was a reliable guide to anything suffered a fatal blow in recent years with the simultaneous fashions for hipsters and the thong.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the whole idea of the thong that, when worn under jeans or tight skirts, the knicker-line would not be visible? Meanwhile, clothes manufacturers were producing low-cut waistlines designed so that when women sat down, about 85 per cent of their actual knickers were on public exhibition. The mere fact that trouser hem-lines were going in the opposite direction to the underlying trends (as it were) was a small detail by comparison. But what is a stock market investor to deduce from such conflicting indicators? No wonder hedge funds became so popular.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Sandi Thom. Her romanticising of the hippy/punk eras acquired added piquancy when she debuted on Top of the Pops last month. As we now know, the show is being killed off after 42 years, a dinosaur from the prehistoric world for which she pines. Real-life punks and hippies will fondly recall Pan's People and Legs & Co, TOTP's in-house dance troupes, whose hem-lines were never less than interesting. But my outstanding memory of the show's heyday was the crippling self-consciousness of the studio audience. There was always a fear in their faces and a stiffness of movement that suggested they had been ordered to dance at gun-point, rather than just in front of a camera.
Thom's song yearns for that era before sophisticated communications technology took over our lives, when records were made of vinyl and "the only way to stay in touch was a letter in the mail". This is ironic, since she apparently owes her overnight success to the internet. The official story is that last year, her car broke down on the way back from yet another sparsely attended concert, provoking the penniless singer to perform a "tour" of 21 concerts from her basement in Tooting, and broadcast them on the web.
The viewing figures mushroomed and Punk-rocker was re-released to take advantage, going to number 1 in Ireland, before also conquering Britain.
From being a poetic failure singing about a simpler past, she seemed suddenly doomed to become a highly paid pop star. God love her.
Then the backlash started, with reports suggesting her breakthrough was not as accidental as it seemed. It emerged that she had signed with a major publisher before the webcasts and that her spontaneous success was the result of some highly professional PR work. It's a complex world we now live in, to be sure.
Supporters of the singer defend her as a genuinely self-made phenomenon, while critics complain that she represents a betrayal of the true spirit of both music and the internet.
The good news, as Thom knows, is that most music fans don't care one way or another.